Recently I was told, “make sure these machines are monitored. I don’t care how it happens.” So I have, using the AWS Cloudwatch agent. In the process of setting up machine monitoring, I stumbled quite a bit, so I’ll share my experience getting started with AWS CloudWatch here. Of course…

In tonight’s NFAD meeting, my friend Doug reached his time to speak, and he told a story of one of his sponsees* asking him: “I’ve been praying for this person who’s been pissing me off for the past couple of weeks but it’s still not changing him.” Doug said, “perhaps…

First, a word of warning: If you’ve subscribed to my Medium feed in hopes of lazily written tech articles, prepare to unsubscribe. I’m going to live out loud, for my own sake. You may find more personal stories than “professional” (ha!) writing going forward. Sorry to disappoint. These days I…

When Terraform 0.12 was introduced — and it wasn’t that long ago — Hashicorp introduced the ‘for’ expression. In 0.12.6, they introduced the ‘for_each’ meta-argument, and then it was extended to apply to modules in 0.13.0. When I started using both of these features with Terraform code, I didn’t have…

Several years ago I actually cared about the differences between AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. Namely, that Terraform did not provide wait conditions and helper scripts that made sense in 2017. In 2017, I was a bit apprehensive picking up a new tool that didn’t seem as “AWS-native” as CloudFormation was…

Two 28 oz tins of crushed or whole San Marzano tomatoes 1/2 green bell pepper, diced very petite 1–2 carrots, diced very petite 1 shallot, diced very petite 4–5 cloves garlic, minced or pressed 3 heaping tbsp freshly chopped basil 2 heaping tbsp freshly chopped Italian parsley 1 1/2 tbsp fermented calabrian peppers Sea salt Olive oil…

Today I learned! AWS gives you the ability to allow users of one account (let’s give it account number 5555–5555–5555) to assume a role in another (we’ll give it 6666–6666–6666). This is pretty straightforward stuff that, as an AWS administrator, you’ll learn sooner rather than later. …

Since you’re going to be chopping chili peppers, either get some gloves or have something with high alcohol content around (rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, etc). Meats: Either: 2 lbs chuck roast, cubed kinda small 1/2 to 1 package bacon: up to you. Chopped. 1 tbsp flour (preferably corn flour but regular flour…

Perhaps many of you who read this quick little blurb will say, “yeah, duh” but until now I have been struggling with an unwieldy $HOME/.kube/config file. Even with the kubectx and kubens tools, I feel like I have to sort through a lot of oddly-named contexts to get logged into the right Kubernetes cluster. Right now I have access to 16 different Kubernetes clusters. I just culled 25 or so out of my $HOME/.kube/config file as my services for a client have come to an end.